…and they’ll take 1.6 kilometers. Or not.
Longtime Readers will all know the hatred I have for the putrid metric system, whereby commonsense units of measure (inches, yards or feet) got turned into incomprehensible gibberish by (of course) the French, who shouldn’t be entrusted with anything other than perhaps wine- or cheesemaking, let alone a new universal system of measurement.
Here’s a lovely old article which goes into more depth on the topic.
And a miss is not as good as a thousand meters.
The article notes – “An inch, it says, is ‘three grains of barley, dry and round, placed end to end, lengthwise’. But that raises the question: how long is a grain of barley?”
Well, duh, it’s a third of an inch.
I once met a D-Day veteran relating a story about discovering there was a Tiger I literally parked outside the basement of a house they had set up a CP in.
To quote:
“…so we radioed for support. You know what they sent? A Goddamned 57 millimeter! A Goddamned 57 millimeter!”
I suspect he wouldn’t have been any happier if they’d borrowed and sent a British 6 Pounder instead.
God bless Mr. Hooper, he’s probably gone to storm Heaven’s gates by now.
Sorry, Kim, but the metric system is FAR easier than old Imperial with its yards, inches, feet, furlongs, cwt, fathoms, leagues, yards, guineas, Fahrenheit, pints, quarts, drams … We progressively changed over from 1966 into the 70s.
Now, the only thing I can’t deal with in metrics is someone’s height. Someone who is 6′ tall I can visualise with ease; someone who is 182.8 cm I have a problem with.
My point exactly.
The arithmetic may be easier, but visualization is impossible.
Unless you’re taught the metric way from the very beginning. I do building design in AutoCAD in both imperial (mostly) and metric and without a doubt the metric (base 10) is far easier to work with than imperial (base 12) measurements.
Back in 1974 I was in a driving course in the US army in Germany and they told us to get used to the metric system right now because by the time we were ETS’d the US will have been converted to metric. Instead, it’s turned into a nightmare of mixed information that only the US gov’t could concoct.
The last time I was in the UK I was up in Scotland, and while pumping gas, er petrol, into a rental Skoda, I was trying to figure out, in my head, how much the price was in $/gal. Let’s see, about 3.75 liters per gallon, and what’s the exchange rate, dollars per pound? To use another Monty Python reference my brain hurt by the end of the excercise.
Rule of thumb: about 4x more expensive.
There are two types of countries in the world, those who have gone to the moon several times and those that use the metric system
JQ
You do of course know that the Apollo rockets were built to metric measurements.
Reminds me of one of my favorite exchanges from the show Archer.
Mallory: “Metric!—Who uses metric!”
Lana: “Every single country on the planet except for us, Liberia and Burma.”
Archer: “Wow really?”
Lana: “Yup.”
Archer: “Cause you never really think of those other two as having their shit together.”